


The Cunning Linguist

by counterheist



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Exhibitionism, F/M, Genderbending, horrible puns and innuendos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-27 00:57:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counterheist/pseuds/counterheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Romano Vargas, adjunct professor of applied linguistics, is extremely professional and would never, <i>ever</i>, abuse the sanctity of his position.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cunning Linguist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cutthroatpixie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cutthroatpixie/gifts).



> Written for the 2012 Spamano Exchange on LJ. Originally posted [here](http://sparo-xchange.livejournal.com/32264.html).

She is kind of scared, and excited, and embarrassed all rolled up into one great big schoolgirl crush when she hangs back behind the lecture and asks if she can make an appointment for his office hours. Professor Vargas smiles at her and she dies inside. The words, ‘Thursday at four,’ revive her so swiftly that her head begins to hurt before she can even get out the door. Like an idiot she responds with, “It’s a date!” and a fistpump to the sky before she can fully come back to herself and remember this is her and _Professor Vargas_ and not some movie star and some other movie star, or her and her future husband. Going decidedly pink everywhere that is visible and probably everywhere that isn’t as well, she beats a hasty retreat before he can say anything else to her, like

“What was that?”

Or

“Get out of my lecture hall, crazy person.”

Or

“I’m married.”

She’s checked his hands for rings before, so she knows he isn’t, but still. It would be just her luck if the first person he told about his secret wife, or, God forbid, _husband_ , was her.

On Thursday she skips all of her morning classes in order to prepare. She makes some really good notes based off of her recordings of his most recent lectures, so that she doesn’t seem entirely stupid when she asks him for help because even though they’re now written down quite neatly in straight lines and pen in her pretty blue notebook she still doesn’t understand one whit what he was going on about. Then she does her hair up, and then down, and then tousled to the side a bit, and then up but messy, and then down again, where she resolutely decides to keep it, because she heard a rumor once that Professor Vargas likes long hair and he likes it down. She heard this rumor from her previous roommate, though, some bitch who always said Professor Vargas was kind of crazy, so she doesn’t know how much salt she needs to take this information with, but. He does seem the type.

After half an hour of decision and help from her new roommate who only thinks she’s going on a date at the student union ( _“Where did you meet him?” “I-i-in **class ahahaha** ” “O. Kay.”_), she picks out a flowing red blouse and a dark blue skirt, short but not, like, crazy short or anything, and sets off from the dorms with a spring in her set inspired entirely by the dull thrum of panic running through her veins. She’s being silly, and ridiculous, and all of the things that go along with that because she’s eighteen and Professor Vargas is twenty-nine at least, and she likes not being expelled and he probably likes not being fired, and also he has never given any indication that he was interested in her at all, even though she’s seen him wink at every single secretary in the building. At least. Twice.

But all the same she steps down the linguistics hallway in the middle of the afternoon and tries not to pull at her clothes too much. She actually does have problems understanding his lectures! She’s not some. Some. Liar! She’s not some liar, and she repeats that to herself as she edges along the turn to the professors’s offices. Most of the doors are either closed or open onto empty rooms, but one of the ones at the end of the hall is both open and is letting light spill out onto the hallway, and that’s the one she’s looking for. The plate next to the door says ‘R. VARGAS, ADJUNCT’ which is really minimalist and kind of hot. She takes a big breath, and knocks.

The response she gets is less than thrilling.

“Eh?” a feminine voice gasps. It’s an absent-minded gasp and she dislikes it immediately because her brain is a traitor where Professor Vargas is involved. “Oh, a student?”

She ducks into the room unapologetically because she scheduled this slot and she doesn’t need to be apologetic, just kind of frazzled because she had a dream about this two weeks ago, except Professor Vargas had been the one to answer when she knocked, and he’d been wearing a Chippendale’s outfit and murmuring about interlinguistics and syntax and she had woken up feeling like she’d spent the night looking up dirty words in Webster’s again. As she stares down the woman, she wonders if this lady even knows what diction is.

‘This lady’ is also wearing a flowing blouse, albeit off-white, but her hair is dark and up in a bun. Her lips are cherry convertible red and her skin looks the effortless kind of tan that takes a whole lot of time for some people to get to without burning themselves silly. Yeah, she and ‘this lady’ really aren’t going to get along.

And Professor Vargas is nowhere to be found.

“Are,” ‘this lady’ fidgets awkwardly in her—in _Professor Vargas’s_ seat, probably because she’s being stared at by a total stranger, okay, cool it, no need to hate anybody even if she’s eating into a scheduled appointment, “You here,” her words are very slow and deliberate, like they’re old friends chatting in the supermarket on a slow day, “to see Roma?”

An arrow stabs straight through her heart, just like in her BFF’s fancy cartoons that are aimed at the kind of people who like making 2D schoolboys kiss in the middle of the night. Not that she’s judging Kiku, or anything, because Kiku’s just as cool as she is weird, and she knows really cute ways to get hair to stop being so frizzy during the summer. That is something to be respected.

“I have an appointment,” she mutters, holding her notebook out in front of her as proof.

‘This lady’ blinks at her with a glazed, absent smile, before biting her lip and letting out a weird little whine. “I. Oh.” She takes a deep breath and flicks her eyes up to the ceiling as though it has all of life’s answers, and then at the paper calendar spread out on the top of Professor Vargas’s desk. There are little notes scratched in Professor Vargas’s hand on each of the different days. Appointments, probably. “Are you Amelia?”

“Yeah,” Amelia says, grudgingly. All the secretaries call Professor Vargas by his name, and sometimes they stop by his office to act tramp-like or, get him to file his paperwork, or whatever, and ‘this lady’ is probably just a secretary because she’s sort of dressed like one, and if she’s not that means she’s a personal friend or a girlfriend or a wife or maybe a lady _assassin_ , sent to kill Professor Vargas for all the awesome language stuff he knows, or speaking with too sexy of an accent, or something. God, but Amelia loves it when he talks, even though sometimes it makes her think about Super Mario Brothers and how she always gets stuck on the last level. “That’s me.”

“I’m Antonia,” ‘this lady’ breathes, “And. And Roma should be _coming_ soon,” she licks her bottom lip and leans back in Professor Vargas’s fancy leather chair. After a second she sits up straight, as though an invisible foot has kicked her under the desk, like Amelia used to kick her brother under the table when he said stupid stuff to their dads, like ‘Amelia tracked in the mud’ or ‘Yes, I would like the last slice of apple pie, thank you.’ “A-actually you should probably wait in the hall,” she gasps, “because it’s nicer.”

Amelia’s knuckles are white against her notebook’s binding because she knows when somebody’s trying to get rid of her, and this smells exactly like _somebody’s_ scheme to get a certain professor all to herself even though he has an appointment with a student, which is more important because education and Amelia’s going to ask him to repeat a lot of words that have R’s in them because his accent does R’s so much better than the local boys, and also _education_. ( _And also fishing trips. Something is reminding her of fishing trips, she sniffs twice, and then dismisses the thought_.) Her feet are frozen to the floor, thank you, and she ain’t moving for nobody.

Antonia stares at her over the desk, growing red at the awkwardness Amelia is forcing on her. In fairness, she doesn’t look like a bad person, or anything, not that Amelia is overreacting, but. And. “Did he say where he was going?” she finally asks. Maybe she can catch him in one of the lecture halls and ask him her questions there. Maybe he forgot his notes. Maybe he’s sleeping in the staff lounge.

“Um,” Antonia says. Then she sits up straight, again, and stares down at the desk in the same way she stared up at the ceiling a minute before. Cocking her head to the left, her eyes go wide and she looks back up at Amelia with a smile. “Yes! Roma went to the store to buy something for dinner! He was really hungry earlier today.” She has the gall to giggle to herself, which is super rude, or spacey at least, and Amelia is kind of done with this whole thing.

“I should,” she begins to put her notebook back in her bag, “I guess,” she looks at the clock and takes one step back. She can make Professor Adnan’s open hours if she hurries. Professor Adnan’s just a visiting lecturer, and also she still doesn’t believe that he comes from a real country because naming a country after a bird that’s not a type of eagle is just ridiculous, but he’s also hot and talks funny in a hot way, so it’s not all bad. “Can you tell him I was here?”

“Mmmmm,” Antonia nods, and smiles, and hums for a little too long but whatever. Amelia’s already out the door and cutting her losses, and deciding that she’ll ask Professor Adnan to explain the historical significance of oiled wrestling again.

When Amelia’s footsteps have faded and she’s reasonably sure that nobody else is listening, Antonia throws her head back against Romano’s plush chair, grinds her hips down against Romano’s face, and screams like she’s been wanting to for the past twenty minutes. Someone thumps on one of the adjoining walls and yells ‘stop watching porn at work, Karpusi, we can hear it in Linguistics again!’ Seconds later, Romano slithers his way up from underneath his own desk, adjusting his trousers as he does. He stops with his legs straddling hers and his arms caging her in, resting on the arms of his chair.

“Couldn’t you have done that faster?” he grumbles, kissing her forehead. He smells like her. She knows he likes that.

“You shouldn’t stand up your students,” she reminds him gently, “It’s not very professional.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He doesn’t move. “So how was my trip to the store?”

“Not long enough,” Antonia winks, large and obvious, “There’s a café by my office you can visit on your way home, if you’re still hungry.”

Romano finally leans back against his desk, tent in his pants in full evidence and contrast to the somber set of half-dead plants and half-graded papers scattered around his office. “I might have to,” he says, and she pinches his bottom before dragging him halfway across campus to the Applied Mathematics building. There are fewer students to walk in on them there, which she knows he likes although he’s always too shy to admit it, but she may have made an appointment for the club she advises to meet with her in an hour, and he may be in for quite a long evening. As Antonia settles into her own battered swivel chair, parts her legs and feels Romano’s warm mouth linger over a bruise on the inside of her left thigh, she gets ready for an evening full of teasing academic questions, thorough discussions, hard problems and long lingering…doubts. On set theory, of course. She doesn’t expect Romano to last much more than ten minutes with six students in the room listening to her speak as he gets her off. But, then, that’s part of why she loves him.

“You’re a crazy bitch,” he mutters, nuzzling her panties as he gets himself comfortable.

“You too,” she says, stroking his hair and looking up all smiles as the first of the club members meanders through her door.

**Author's Note:**

> Amelia was femAmerica, although she started out as a nameless OC and meandered into femJapan territory for a little while before I remembered that I love America having a great big crush on Romano. She was totally gonna invite him out to Olive Garden after their study session, too. Dude missed out.


End file.
